Been a little while since I have written a tutorial, so I thought I would make it a good one

I’ve been thinking again about the earlier Dave Hill tutorial that I have written and I don’t think that I did his work justice, so here’s take two Again I’m using the Topaz Adjust Filter to speed things up a little.

I looked at the Dave Hill website again (nice upgrade btw!) and carefully studied all the elements again:

• Everything is usually in focus and sharp, so foreground and background and of course the people.
• High contrast of colour
• Faux HDR look of everything

So lets get to work Firstly I thought about the kind of photo that I wanted to create and for some reason I came up with a street fighter styled idea. Here are the three stock images that I used:

Each image above links to the stock images that I used.

And here is what I ended up with:

So let’s break it down.

1. Cut out the two fighters in each of the stock images. I used the pen tool and then channels for the hair. Save the two original files with the layers and the mask in case you need to make adjustments to them.

2.Drag the two fighters to the new canvas  and resize to make them fit the background image.

3. Create two folders and name them Fighter 1 and Fighter 2. Drag each fighter layer into its own folder. This will make it easier to edit them both later on. Turn both of there folders off for now.

4. Duplicate the background layer. Now its time to make it a bit more detailed. Go to Filter>Topaz Labs>Topaz Adjust 3. From the side menu, choose the preset Crisp, then click ok.

5. Turn on Fighter 1 folder. Create a layer below the cut out  in the same folder and with the brush tool, with the opacity set at 25%, draw in a shadow.  Start darker at the foot, the lighter as it end. Apply a guassian blur of about 5px, then turn the layer opacity down to 50%.

6. Add a curves adjustment layer. Create a gentle S to bring up the contrast. Right mouse click on the curves layer and select create clipping mask from the fly out menu.  On the mask of the curves layer, mask out the pants of the fighter.

7. Add a hue/saturation adjustment layer. Lower the saturation to -50%. Right mouse click on the hue/saturation layer and select create clipping mask from the fly out menu.

8. Alt-click on the fighter layer so its the only layer active. Then hold crtl-alt and press the tilde (~) key. This will select the highlights in the image. Set this layer’s blend mode to screen and opacity to 65%. Apply a layer mask. On the mask of this layer, mask out the pants of the fighter again. Then turn the background layer back on.

9. Repeat steps 4 to 7 for Fighter 2 folder.

10. Now its time to blend the fighters a little bit more into the background. Press Ctrl-Alt-Shift and E at the same time to create a new merged layer of all the layers below. Go to Filter>Topaz Labs>Topaz Adjust 3. From the side menu, choose the preset Neutraliser_by_JorgeDiaz, then click ok.

11. Create another Curves Adjustment layer and pull it down in the middle to darken the whole image a little.

12. Create a blank layer and select the elliptical marquee tool and draw a big oval. Then press crtl-alt-i to invert the selection and fill it with black with the paint bucket tool.

13. Apply a Gaussian Blur of 70 px and lower the opacity of the layer to 65%.

14. Create another blank layer and fill it with 50% grey. Turn the layer’s blend mode to soft light. With the brush tool, set to 30% opacity and 30% flow and with black as the foreground colour, go over all the shadows on the two fighters and darken them a bit more. Switch the colour to white and go over the highlights to bring them out some more.

15. Press Ctrl-Alt-Shift and E to create another merged layer copy. Then hold crtl-alt and press the tilde (~) key to select all the highlights of the images. Now press crtl-alt-i to invert the selection and hit crtl-j to create a new layer from the selection.  Change the layers blend mode to multiply and lower the opacity of this layer to 65%.

16. All done

Dave Hill is one photographer that I have a lot of awe for. I love the way he creates his images. Some people may say that they are too stylised or cartoonish but after trying to recreate his work, I found that its a lot of work! Even a lot of the tutorials that are around don’t come close to what he does. I believe that I may have cracked it the Dave Hill secret finally. I do welcome feedback in regards to what I have created.

Here are the two images that I used to re-create his look. Please keep in mind that it was hard to find evenly lit images, so I just worked with what I got

Stock Image 1 for Dave Hill Tut

Stock Image2 for Dave Hill tut

Also keep in mind to achieve the best results from this technique, its best to use well lit, low noise images as when you begin to enhance them, the noise can really show!

Original Image and Final

Step 1

First thing to do is to even out the lighting in the image so that its more evenly lit. Create a curves adjustment layer. Fill the mask with black with the paint bucket. Choose a soft brush and switch the colours to white and paint in the sections that look too dark. You will end up with the following image:

You can see that the girl looks more evenly lit now.

Step 2

Create a new layer by pressing crtl-shift-alt-e and name it High Glamour. Next step is to apply the Imagenomic Filter Portraiture. Use the default setting High Glamour. Next step is mask out the back ground. Switch into quick mask mode and paint over all the skin. After all the skin has been masked out, exit quick mode. Invert the selection by pressing crtl-shift-I, then click on the mask icon to apply the mask. You will end up with the following image:

So you can see here that the skin has a higher contrast and more of a glow compared to the original image.

Step 3

For the next step, press crtl-shift-alt-e and create a new layer that is a merged version of all the previous layers and call it base. Now click on the channels tab, click on the green channel to activate it.

Then crtl click on the green channel thumbnail to select it. You will see a selection of all the light areas of the channel.

Now click back on the RGB channel to turn all the channels back on and go back to your layers palette with the selection still active.

Now press crtl-J to create a new layer with the selection. Crtl click on the new layer to select it. Crtl-shift-i to invert the selection. Click back on to merged layer that you created earlier and press crtl-J again to create a new layer. change this layers blend mode to multiply and change the layer above it to screen. Delete the layer named base as you don’t need it any more.

Put the two new layers into a folder and make the mask selection for this folder by crtl clicking on the high glamour layer mask, the with the folder selected, click on the layer mask icon. Viola new mask for the layer group in no time at all! You image should be looking like this now:

Step 4

Now it time to HDR up that background! Press crtl-shift-alt-e and create a new layer and call it Psychedlic. Use the topaz labs filter psychedelic setting to create a HDR looking background. The filter was just applied on it default setting.

You will notice now that the skin and the sky looks really yuck.  Time to mask the skin out using the same technique in step 3.

Looking pretty good so far?

Step 5

Now the sky doesn’t really look very HDR does it? Take the second photo that you downloaded and drag it across to the photo you’re working on. Make sure that its on the top. Apply the Topaz Labs filter setting detailed on the sky. This just brings out the details subtly without being OTT.

Mask the sky out, easiest way would be to do with a channel mask, but that’s a tutorial for another day.

Now you’ve got an awesome sky and your photo should look like this:

Step 6

One last step, press crtl-shift-alt-e and create a new layer and change the blend mode to Overlay and change the layer opacity to 50%. Now add a Hue/Saturation adjustment mask and put the saturation down to -100. Right click on the adjustment layer and create a clipping mask, so that the Hue/Saturation layer only affects the overlay layer.

And there we go Dave Hill syled image: